A Special Class of Experience: Positive Affect Evoked by Music and the Arts

Emery Schubert
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Emery Schubert: Empirical Musicology Laboratory, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 8, 1-16

Abstract: A positive experience in response to a piece of music or a work of art (hence ‘music/art’) has been linked to health and wellbeing outcomes but can often be reported as indescribable (ineffable), creating challenges for research. What do these positive experiences feel like, beyond ‘positive’? How are loved works that evoke profoundly negative emotions explained? To address these questions, two simultaneously occurring classes of experience are proposed: the ‘emotion class’ of experience (ECE) and the positive ‘affect class’ of experience (PACE). ECE consists of conventional, discrete, and communicable emotions with a reasonably well-established lexicon. PACE relates to a more private world of prototypical aesthetic emotions and experiences investigated in positive psychology. After a review of the literature, this paper proposes that PACE consists of physical correlates (tears, racing heart…) and varied amounts of ‘hedonic tone’ (HT), which range from shallow, personal leanings (preference, liking, attraction, etc.) to deep ones that include awe, being-moved, thrills, and wonder. PACE is a separate, simultaneously activated class of experience to ECE. The approach resolves long-standing debates about powerful, positive experiences taking place during negative emotion evocation by music/art. A list of possible terms for describing PACE is proposed.

Keywords: aesthetic emotion; self-actualisation; the arts; negative emotion; affective words; awe; being moved; positive psychology; coarse and refined emotions; qualia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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